I always enjoy the Explainer’s year-end list of questions that didn’t get answered during the year. This year’s list is a melancholy thing, since the Explainer is retiring, but it also happens to have several literary questions. In particular, number 17 – “Why does a writer use characters’ last name only and not the first name after they’re introduced?” So I encourage everyone to read the full, rather aggrieved, question, and vote for it to be the one that gets answered this year, so we can all find out why it is that writers do that. Or perhaps one of the other literary questions, such as whether those with ideographic alphabets are S.O.L when it comes to palindromes.

And while you’re there, you can look up the year-end questions answered in previous years, such as “Why do boys like sticks?”